


jus sanguinis, jus soli

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Land - Freeform, M/M, Romance, You Can't Go Home Again, except sometimes when you can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 18:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night Vale, Carlos has decided, is like deserts everywhere: vast and unknowable, with bad cell phone reception. Also, there are angels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jus sanguinis, jus soli

When Carlos was five years old, lying on the soft grass in the backyard, looking up at the sky, he saw, for the first time, a layer of clouds being blown along by the wind, moving westwards before his eyes. He thinks that was the first time he knew clouds were real things, that the distance separating himself from their distant forms was a real thing, and that he, himself, was a real thing: a tiny mind in a tiny body occupying a tiny space on a spinning earth that was a complex and unknowable system that it would take a lifetime to understand, so he’d better get started.

Living in Night Vale, he decides, feels like that pretty much all the time. “And where did you come from?” he asks very gently, and the waitress looks down at him kindly and says: “Oh, you don’t wanna know.”

It’s not like, you don’t wanna know, as in it’s a terrible story involving fire, and sinkholes, and ethereal screeching coming from the creatures who live in the great spaces beneath the earth; it’s just you don’t wanna know, why would you, nothing interesting happens here.

“Will you have some pecan pie, sugar?” she asks, and sweeps the empty space around the table.

“No,” Carlos says. “I mean, yes. Thank you. With cream. I mean – I do want to know.”

“Oh, well,” she’s saying, while she goes to the counter and lifts up the lid of the dish, and gets the pie slice on a plate and spoons on the cream, all one long, thoughtful syllable. “I just got up from behind my desk one day. I had my fan running – oh, dear, I hope someone remembered to switch it off. I guess the electric bill is pretty high by now if no one did.”

“That was a while back?” Carlos asks. The pie does not taste of pecans – he thinks he can make out something like sherry, and bittersweet orange – but it’s good.

“Oh, I guess it must have been. I mean I had to drive so far. The roads here are pretty good though. I mean… long, and straight.” She trails off, uncertain. “I guess. I mean… it took such a long time.”

“Why did you come here?” Carlos asks, gently.

She looks right at him. “Well… you know. I had to. You know.”

Carlos doesn’t, but he leaves a substantial tip.

*

"Cecil," Carlos says, that night, standing in the kitchen doorway watching Cecil stir-frying aubergine pieces with sea salt, "I have a theory about why people come to Night Vale. I've been doing some structured interviews, and I think…"

"Oh," Cecil says, and it doesn't seem to be in response to anything Carlos has just said. "I think someone's at the door."

Carlos glances out the window, and doesn't think he sees anyone. The doorbell rings and he goes to see who it is. When he gets back, Cecil has laid down his wooden spoon and turned the gas off. "Who was that?" Cecil asks, idly flipping through a graphic novel Carlos left out in the morning.

"Who was what?"

"At the door."

"I didn't go to answer the door. I went to…" He pauses, then his eyes light on the abandoned food on the stove. "It's Friday, isn't it? I went to get my phone, we need to order from Big Rico's."

"Right," Cecil says, and stands up, presumably to find the menu. Before he gets it, he stands at the window for a few minutes, looking out into the night. Carlos doesn't know what he's looking for.

*

"My name's Elsie," says the woman at the gas station. Night Vale is one of those places, like those only-on-the-way-to-somewhere rural towns Carlos remembers from childhood, where you don't have to pump your own gas. "I grew up in, ah. A long way away. Well, it was cold in the winters. Not like here. One spring we waited till May for the thaw. I walked to school in the mornings and one day I didn't go back. I had my permit and I started driving. I like the way it's always warm, here. I like the way the light looks."

It frightens Carlos in a way that he can't quite articulate that her life story is told but the tank of the car isn't yet full, clear liquid dripping from the leaky nozzle of the pump. "Okay," he says. "Do you ever want to go back?"

"I don't," she says, pausing, "I don't really know" – and she looks lost, all of a sudden, like he's opened some door in her mind to a place she doesn't recognise. 

Carlos says, "It's fine, really, it's fine" without really knowing what he's reassuring her of, if it's anything.

*

"Here is a list of interests in land," Cecil says, on the radio. "Freehold; leasehold; copyhold; mesne; puisne; frightening; haemoglobulous; osseous; home. In a recent announcement, the Night Vale Department of Lost Souls and Land Registration wish to state the necessity of clear, municipally sanctioned registers of title. As you will be aware, the City Council recently decreed that voluntary first registration is now mandatory and someone has to own all that desert, folks. How about you, do you own a house? How about a cornfield, like John Peters, you know, the farmer? Maybe you went down to the Green Market and own a basket of invisible corn. Maybe in the dark, you reach into the small box hidden under your bed and unfold the only thing you have of the parents you barely remember, on perfect and precious vellum. Get yourself down to the City Council offices as soon as possible for compulsory first registration. Be sure to eat something sweet afterwards, and maybe don't drive home."

Carlos suddenly hits the brakes, pulls over on the side of the road and rests his arms on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he takes a deep breath and turns the car around. 

*

The Night Vale Department of… and Land Registration is something of a surprise. 

“How did you end up here?” Carlos asks, insistently, as the man bustles and rustles around his desk, looking for something, finding it, putting it down, looking up at Carlos, starting over. Carlos had thought that the City Council offices might be shrieking pits or towers wreathed in shadow, or maybe flame, or green mambas, but this is an airy, well-lit room with desks and Ikea lamps and a potted yucca. Then again, this is only the first floor.

“Get where?” the man asks. The sign on his desk reads: “Styx; Phlegethon; Aornis”. Carlos has years of training in research methods and doubts that that’s his name.

“Here,” Carlos says, waving to indicate, Night Vale, the middle of the desert, the American southwest, but the man looks at him and says, level: “The City Council is an equal-opportunities employer. The Night Vale Department of… and Land Registration welcomes you. It welcomed me.”

"Here," Carlos says again, "I meant here, in the town" – and the man frowns and looks troubled.

"You know…" He stops. "You know the big patterns, in the pampas. Like flowers and stars."

Carlos frowns in return. "The Nazca lines?"

"Yes," the man says, seriously, "that isn't what I used to do. I never did anything like that. Now, you're here for land registration."

"Ah, no," Carlos says. "I'm a scientist. I'm just doing interviews on how people came to live in Night Vale. I thought you might be able to give me some statistical information. I don't own property here."

“All space occupied in Night Vale must be registered,” the man intones, and then, more cheerfully: “It’s not that hard. The process is mostly online these days. I just need your name, your address in Night Vale, your blood type…"

"I'll come back another time," Carlos says, hastily, and backs out of the office, step by step, his feet stirring dust.

*

Cecil sounds a little more animated than usual on his show the next night. "Listeners," he declaims, "the City Council reiterates – and oh, listeners, you know how much they _hate_ having to do that – that time is running out for co-existent title registration. The Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex was seen momentarily today _inside_ the Moonlight All-Night Diner. Patrons were heard to report that it felt kinda like a rush of blood to the head, only, for blood, read jaw-cracking foreboding and for head, read, everything that has ever existed and had extension and duration. Sounds pretty nasty, folks. Be safe. From beneath you, it devours.

"Also," he goes on, and Carlos, listening, is simultaneously filled with a similar sense of foreboding and affection as sweetly dizzying as wine, "workmen out digging for the new Night Vale municipal underground substation report that the ground is oozing something sticky and red. Wouldn't it be great if it's a new linctus seam, listeners! Too many citizens in Night Vale have coughed in misery since the last supplies dried up, their only relief coming from the strictly forbidden pseudoephedrine labs in Radon Canyon. But – yes, news coming in now – it's just blood again. Such a shame."

Carlos breathes out, goes into the kitchen and starts making dinner. He's got gluten-free spaghetti boiling with a pinch of salt when Cecil comes in, yawning, and Carlos can tell without turning around that he's tired but happy, an impression of a job-well-done in the looseness of his gait. He smiles and leans into the kiss Cecil gives him, and Cecil's contentment is catching. They eat in comfortable silence, the nightly sirens and small sounds of the desert creeping in through the window, and afterwards Cecil clears up while Carlos stands at the window, looking out at the beautiful night. 

Later, Carlos is sitting at his desk, putting together his notes from the day, when Cecil says, "You should get that."

Carlos thought he was sleeping – Cecil is lying on the couch with a book closed on his thumb – but his eyes are bright when Carlos turns to look at him. His phone rings, an unknown number; Carlos answers it with a very trepidatious, "Hello?"

Silence, then a sound like the wind lifting sand. A voice howls, dimly, "Mostly online these days!" and then it goes to dialtone.

"I think," Carlos says, carefully, setting his phone back down on the table, "that was the guy from the Night Vale Department of Land Registration."

"The Night Vale Department of…. and Land Registration," Cecil murmurs sleepily.

"Right," Carlos says, a little confused, "right, I think."

There's more light in the room, somehow, than there ought to be. Carlos sits at his desk and thinks he feels something sticky beneath his feet.

*

Friday again, which means Big Rico's.

"Got a light?" asks Old Woman Josie, and Carlos makes the sort of polite noises that mean, everywhere, _sure I've got a light but you can't smoke in here_. She waits for him to finish his slice of rice-based pizza and they go out back to the empty lot, the fence blown down so they have a clear view over the open space of desert.

They sit down on a discarded crate. Carlos pulls out his keys and offers her the miniature blowtorch on his keychain. He only smoked for the couple of months he was writing up, back in northern California, but he kept it for crème brulée. 

"Thanks," Josie says, and blows smoke. "Want to know a secret?"

"Yes," Carlos says, automatically. He's a scientist, after all. 

"Not all the angels are called Erika."

Carlos chuckles, thinks, what the hell, it's not these that are going to kill him, not in Night Vale, and takes one of the cigarettes she offers. "I thought," he says, lighting up, "that the City Council said we couldn't talk about angels."

"They protect me." She breathes out, rasping. " _You_ know."

Helplessly, Carlos shakes his head. "I don't." And, suddenly: "How did you come here, to Night Vale?"

She looks at him. "Not like how you're thinking. Do you think about your research all the time?"

"All the time." Carlos sighs. He thinks, for the thousandth time, that if he could just articulate this – if he could explain why Night Vale, with its gas clouds and ash clouds and hooded figures and sentient taramaslata and strontium-enriched tap water - exerts its steady pull on him, like a lodestar or a love affair, then maybe he wouldn't have had to stay up three nights in a row before making his grant proposal and he wouldn't, now, be running around town desperately corralling interview subjects and looking with bemusement at the enormous gaps in his notes. He believes, still, that the world is infinite and perhaps infinitely unknowable, but that nevertheless he can stand still on one piece of it with his callipers and calorimeters and describe just this one, brightly-lit place. 

"Well," Josie says, "I came here a long, long time ago."

"Where from?" Carlos asks, again automatically, wishing he had a pen and not a toothpick dipped in one of Cecil's bottles of food colouring. He half-expects her to look at him, confused, and whisper, like the woman at the laundromat and the man at the back of the trailer park and the erstwhile head of the PTA, _I don't know, I just… don't know._

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." She tips her head and grins at him. "I was a scientist. Do you know your shoes are full of liquid?"

Carlos snaps his toothpick and says, "Fuck."

*

That night, without meaning to, Carlos visits the Night Vale Public Library. Beneath the cavernous stacks, he takes careful steps, listening for the distant creak and rattle of the librarians pulling at their chains and stakes. From the way the sound echoes he understands that there's a great open space above his head that he can't see. When lightning flashes, he looks up at the glass half-sphere making up the roof, and for a strobe-lit sequence of seconds, he sees what looks like a half-destroyed, ragged aircraft revolving slowly, suspended from the apex of the dome.

Somewhere close at hand, a twig snaps, and Carlos's hair is being ruffled by a wind from nowhere. He breathes in, breathes out and takes a few steps backwards. Something brushes up against his legs and he turns to see the librarian's mad eyes, the sharp edges of broken glass in her hands, and he backs into the hissing stacks, picks up the nearest book and throws it as hard as he can. 

He wakes up shouting and shaking and Cecil, kind and steady and loving, perhaps more so than anyone else Carlos has ever known, rolls over and slips an arm around his shoulders and kisses his hair and breathes in rhythm with him, understanding without needing to be told. "There," he says, after a few minutes, "there, you're home now." 

Carlos smiles at the simplicity of that, and Cecil must feel him relax because he lets go and gets up to adjust the drapes that are fluttering in the night breeze. He sits down for a moment on the end of the bed, presumably somewhere near where Carlos's feet must have been earlier in the night, because there's squelching. Carlos winces.

"Cecil," he says, gratefully, and Cecil turns on the bedside light. It's strange, Carlos thinks, because he could see pretty well without it, making out the shape of the room and the curtain patterns. He turns, and something has caught Cecil's attention, frozen him halfway into getting back into bed, his hands outstretched. "Cecil, what is it?"

Wordlessly, Cecil hands him his stack of checked-out books. In between the four copies of that one book about Helen Hunt, Carlos finds three other biographies: Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper and John Bingham, seventh Earl of Lucan. 

"How interesting," Cecil says, delicately, and Carlos can't read his expression. He sits upright in bed, leafing through the books, occasionally looking up at Cecil looking across at him, aware of the gradual slowing down of his heartbeat. He thinks that there's something here, something obvious that he, still on his quest to understand the known universe, is missing.

*

The City Council bans Wednesday again and then Thursday gets stuck like a scratched record, so Carlos has lunch four times, each time listening to the lonesome story of the woman at the table next to him, crying into her banana milkshake about the girl she left behind back east with a broken heart and a failing transplant, so by the time it gets to be Friday he has to order take-out from Big Rico's and eat it as the daylight fades to nothingness.

He's wiping pizza sauce off his fingers, collating his notes again and listening to _Welcome To Night Vale_ when something bright catches his attention outside the window. On the radio, Cecil is saying, "And now, for a message from our sponsor" – and Carlos smiles involuntarily as he gets up and dims his table lamp so he can make out what's happening on the street outside his lab. The streetlamp flickers and he thinks he can make out a corresponding flicker of movement, then nothing. He stands there for a few seconds longer, but there's nothing else. 

"That was General Electric," Cecil is saying, as Carlos switches his lamp back on and sits back down. "And now… Oh." 

It's not his radio voice. It's his ordinary, human voice, the one Carlos hears in his kitchen and his bed and sometimes, as comfort during collective nightmares, inside his head. It has an edge of fear to it. "This is not" – and then there's a small, wordless gasp of pain, and silence.

Afterwards Carlos won't quite be able to remember dropping everything he's holding and picking up his keys and sprinting out to his car and running three stoplights on the way to the radio station. He'll recall, vaguely, that the radio in his car is always tuned to community public radio and all it's broadcasting is the harsh, irregular breathing of someone who can't quite force enough air into their lungs. Carlos jumps out of the car and runs into the building and ignores the lit-up _ON AIR_ sign. Inside the studio, something blazes with light. Cecil is on his knees, looking up, hands clasped. He's surrounded by a circle of angels giving off an unearthly glow, their wings half-spread. 

"Cecil!" Carlos yells, battering on the glass wall, and everything inside goes black. 

When the electric light returns, after a minute which has seemed like a lifetime to Carlos, Cecil is sitting on the edge of his desk, cross-legged, looking oddly relaxed. He's alone in the room. He smiles and waves at Carlos, mouthing, _dead air_. "Listeners," he says, smooth as honey, "I apologise for the short break in transmission. It was a result of technical difficulties. We go now to the weather."

After another minute, Cecil bounces down from his desk and lets Carlos in. "Hi," he says, cheerfully. "I'll be done in ten minutes."

"Cecil," Carlos says urgently, "this is going to sound crazy" – and there's a pause to swallow the hysterical giggle, because here, in Night Vale, this sounds crazy – "but I don't know how I got here. I don't really know…" He pauses. "I don't know."

The smile has dropped off Cecil's face. "I know," he says, low and earnest. "Just wait a few minutes, okay? I'll – um, I'll take you home."

"Okay," Carlos says. He sits down and waits, taking shallow breaths, suddenly unsure not just of how he got here from his lab, but how he crossed that interstitial space between a life he left somewhere across the desert and this small, dark room, alive with Cecil's presence.

*

Carlos takes his coffee black, but Cecil doesn't and they're out of milk. Cecil is having trouble leaving the house right now – this week, forty-seven percent of Night Vale citizenry are having difficulty lining their feet exactly up with the ground – and Carlos is happy to go. In the light of early evening, the cooling desert air feels palpable, like a living thing. Carlos remembers that it's two rights then a left to the grocery after six o'clock, and turns a corner, whistling.

There is a burst of very bright light. Then, there is the sound of a great deal of air being moved out of the way of something very large. Carlos looks up and says, "Oh." 

“I am not here,” says the angel, Erika. She has beautiful spreading wings and an unearthly luminescence. Seen peripherally, it looks like she’s wearing a tux.

“Seen peripherally, it looks like zie’s wearing a tux,” Erika says sternly. “Zie, hir, hirs. Thank you.”

“Sorry,” Carlos says. “You were saying…”

“I am not here. Angels are not real. There is no hierarchy of angels that runs from truth to fallen.”

“Right,” Carlos says, sits down on a log and rests his head on his elbows. There are no trees in Night Vale, either, but it’s still a log. “Right, of course.”

Erika comes and sits down next to him, dimming the light somewhat. There’s a kindness in hir beautiful, eerie face. “I have come," zie says, carefully, "to give you something."

Here in Night Vale, that could mean anything from his heart's desire to a clout around the ear to a symphony for fish bowls. Carlos waits.

"We had a meeting," Erika tells him. "We decided, between us, that this was right. You were behind the glass. You wouldn't remember it. Do you remember it now?"

"Yes," Carlos says, because he does remember now, everything – all the interviews and the stories and the neat rows of results written up in green food colouring. "I remember – I had theory. I mean, I have a theory. I was collecting evidence for my theory." He pauses. "It's the Night Vale Department of _Lost Souls_ and Land Registration!"

Erika gives him a slow, careful smile. "Very good."

"Night Vale," Carlos says, slowly, "is where all lost people are found, eventually." He lets out another one of those hysterical giggles. "Lost people. Lost things as well? I mean, do they serve the fruit cups at Arby's out of the Holy Grail?"

Zie isn't amused. "You will also remember that angels are not real."

Hir face is starting to blur into the background; the light is beginning to dim. Carlos blurts out, "Wait! How can angels not be real when I'm talking to one?"

Zie looks at him pityingly. "Angels aren't real. They're personal."

"Oh," Carlos says, then: "Why are you helping me?"

Erika smiles again, hir face still suffused with beauty. "Josie said we should," zie says after a minute. "She said you were a good man and a good scientist, and that Cecil…"

"Cecil?" Carlos repeats, instinctively.

"Cecil loves you," zie says. "Sometimes, that's enough."

"Oh," Carlos says, again, suddenly blinking back tears for no reason, and zie disappears in front of his eyes.

*

"Cecil," Carlos says, shutting the door firmly behind him, holding up his bottle of milk like some weird libation. "How did you come here to Night Vale?"

Cecil says, half-laughing: "Head-first." And then, "It was a long fall."

*

After that there's another week. The City Council ban stepping on the sidewalk cracks, then decriminalise it, then make it mandatory; Cecil reports on the new dance craze of standing in a dark room counting breaths, contemplating one's lost chance of salvation.

Carlos's feet have started sticking to the ground with every step. It's worst when he's barefoot, leaving kidney-shaped bloody footprints on the bathroom tiles. Cecil comes out holding a stained cloth and asks, mildly, "Aren't you going to do something about this? It's getting a little unhygienic. And I'm told," he adds intelligently, "it's mostly online, these days."

"I am not," Carlos says, through gritted teeth, "going to register myself."

"Why not?" Cecil asks, still looking at the cloth and carrying it through to the kitchen sink to wash it out. The water swirls red. "The City Council have been very clear, and in any case it's good to have clarity in these things."

"Because it's silly," Carlos snaps back, suddenly deeply impatient with bans on sidewalk cracks and writing implements and wheat and wheat by-products and every other ridiculous Night Vale municipal ordinance. "Because it's silly and it's stupid, I don't own anything here, I'm not staying!"

"Really?" Cecil says, wrist-deep in water, standing in the kitchen filled with pots and pans and books and USB sticks and other debris of a shared life. His voice is light and cutting.

Carlos sits down at the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands. "I'm sorry," he says, heavily. "I really – Cecil, I am sorry."

He wants to knock his pile of papers to the floor in a melodramatic gesture, but Cecil reaches for them instead, starts putting them in order. Still lightly, he asks: "How did you come to be here?"

Carlos hesitates, then says, "I got in my car and I started driving." He pauses. "Cecil. Do you know what's going to happen before it happens?"

"Yes," Cecil says. "Sometimes. How did you come here?"

"I was just… it was just a day. I taught classes. I was looking for a new project, a new… something. There was someone, but it wasn't – it wasn't serious. We didn't" – he wants to say, _we didn't cook; we didn't kiss in the shower; we didn't live and love and lie together in warm, desert silence_ – "think it was going anywhere. It wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't, either. I just… I started driving. I brought my team with me but… they were all…"

"Lost souls," Cecil says. Something in his gaze is questioning; something hangs in the air between them.

"I'll go in the morning," Carlos decides. "I'll go in the morning and register the – ah, the space that I occupy." He breathes out, aware of his own bones, blood, sinew, the air that he displaces. Cecil gets up from his side of the table and impulsively, Carlos kisses him, a warm lazy kiss that tastes of iron, and home. 

"Is this it?" he wonders aloud. "Is this all there is?"

Because it seems so little, somehow – to occupy his couple of cubic feet of space and nevertheless contain everything else, his whole internal life and his history and whatever it is, soft and loving and infinitely complex, that he feels for Cecil and, by extension, for this strange little town in the desert that is as much a part of Cecil as the minerals laid down in his bones. But then, Carlos thinks, this is what he was looking for all along: the place to stand on while he levers Night Vale into clarity, and perhaps the whole earth with it, given time. 

"Yes," Cecil says, casting his own light. "Isn't it enough?"

"Yes," Carlos says. "Yes."

He kisses Cecil again, just because he can, and Cecil smiles and touches his hair before going to find some shoes. It's early evening, time for _Welcome to Night Vale_ , and Carlos watches from the doorway as Cecil walks along the street towards the radio station, stepping on the sidewalk cracks, with his feet that sometimes, not all the time, don't quite line up with the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> "Mesne" and "puisne", I feel bound to point out, are pronounced "mean" and "puny". Also, it was gluten-free pie.


End file.
